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Published online: 10 January 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
Today, it is widely acknowledged that the world of psychoanalysis has taken a turn to the “social” and the “political.” Increasingly, psychoanalytic organizations, institutes, journals, conferences, and online forums focus their attention on systemic racism, colonialism, the lack of people of color in our profession, transphobia, and the conflict in Israel/Palestine. This focus has been highly contentious, breaking apart the American Psychoanalytic Association and transforming many psychoanalytic institutes into battlegrounds.
Proponents of this turn to the social are many in number and vociferous in their call to transform organized psychoanalysis. Generally, they believe they are introducing something altogether new, previously neglected, and undeniably transformative. In keeping with the nationwide interest in systemic racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, they draw upon the long-standing postmodern articulation of identity as the sine qua non of what constitutes the political. For them, as with so many others in the United States at this moment, diversity, equity, and inclusion are the political. Insofar as the history of psychoanalysis is the history of ignoring marginalized identities, they assume that they are the first to introduce social and political thinking into our field.
It is within this context that Jon Mills and Daniel Burston have edited an anthology that fundamentally challenges this worldview. Critical Theory and Psychoanalysis: From the Frankfurt School to Contemporary Critique demonstrates the rich history of the Frankfurt School’s contribution to understanding the social and political through the use of psychoanalysis beginning in the 1930s. Drawing on both Marx and Freud, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others wrote in response to the rise of authoritarianism in their native Germany. In seeking to unde